


And the Sky Has Claws

by Anonymous



Series: Return to Oz [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autistic Quentin Coldwater, Bisexual Quentin Coldwater, Conversion Therapy Alluded To, Depressed Quentin Coldwater, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Just Two Dudes Chilling In A Library, Late Night Conversations, M/M, POV Quentin Coldwater, Past Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn, Sub Quentin Coldwater, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Zero Feet Apart Because They're Struggling Not To Have An Emotional Affair, mentions of Fen/Eliot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24188665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: I had not intended to write a sequel to 'The Grass is Dead, the Gold is Brown', but like... Here I am with Quentin's POV. I don't even have an exact imagined point where this falls, but like I'm already imagining a slight alternate universe in which Quentin and Alice are allowed to just be friends instead of having intensely uncomfortable makeout sessions, so who even knows.(I cannot be the only person who hates that their whole relationship is the two of them being REALLY BAD at being together while other people loudly talk about their sexual chemistry at them, like they could have had a good relationship as people if TV writers weren't weird about sex)
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Return to Oz [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1748788
Comments: 25
Kudos: 82
Collections: Anonymous





	And the Sky Has Claws

Eliot finds him reading alone. Which, okay… is how most people usually find Quentin. Like, kind of a lot of the time. The armory might have been something of a bust, but there is still a regular library, and there’s a lot to learn. And they have time now, and so they really should get acquainted with all the law and lore that didn’t make it into the books.

The books _about_ Fillory, that is, and not the books _in_ Fillory. Which are the books he is currently applying himself to the study of.

Except he’s currently applying himself to the study of Eliot, who’s flopped out beside him with a dramatic sigh in a clear bid for attention. It’s kind of comforting, how intensely Eliot it is. After everything they’ve been through… it feels normal. Besides, the reading nook he’d settled into had felt kind of big for one… maybe if he’d laid across the bench seat, but he’d found it insufficiently cushioned for that, so he’d tucked himself into one corner. Eliot fills the space nicely, leaving his slippers on the floor nearby and tucking his feet up onto the thin velvet cushion, knees up and arms artfully flung, and the top of his head just touching Quentin’s thigh.

“Let me guess, another bad batch of champagne?”

“We’ll get it.” He waves a lazy hand. “No, just… I needed to get… away, for a little bit. Also it’s three in the morning, have you been up reading?”

Eliot plucks the book from Quentin’s hand, though Quentin doesn’t protest-- beyond an initial squawk-- the way he might. He should probably try to get some sleep. 

“Well what are you doing up?” He counters, watches Eliot slip a bookmark into place before closing the book-- Quentin’s bookmark, though how Eliot had gotten it, he hadn’t noticed him taking it…

“Like I said, I needed to get away.” There’s no levity in his voice all of a sudden, his eyes are a million miles away. 

Away from his wife, then. Quentin pushes his hair up from his forehead and rests a hand there. 

“Well, the library’s a good place for it.”

“Mm, give me the full Reading Rainbow.” Eliot snorts, comes back to himself a little. There’s still something a little brittle about it, but the humor is a good sign. He’s come to realize that. Eliot can be vulnerable, but there’s a certain wryness he shouldn’t be without unless he’s choosing to give it up-- it’s his armor. 

“Well, until you interrupted me, I was catching up on the history of Fillory’s legal code, and what sorts of laws a high king is able to change versus which laws are innate to the land and its magic and cannot be altered, and which laws have been made by kings in the past and how they’ve altered the legal landscape, and what powers the court has in a king’s absence… I mean it’s an interesting subject! But you don’t have to take my word for it.”

That gets him a laugh. Their eyes meet, and he can’t begin to decipher everything in Eliot’s, except that he looks… He looks warm and he looks hopeful and he looks like he’s facing a firing squad and he looks like he’s sorry, and it’s all a jumble, and to be fair, Quentin finds most people a jumble and he couldn’t even say that much, and he normally doesn’t do great with eye contact, because either it gets uncomfortable and he can’t hold it at all, or he goes _hard_ in the other direction and just stares into the other person’s eyes until _they_ get uncomfortable, but with Eliot sometimes it’s like…

Weird, but… it’s a weird that works. Like there’s a thing in Eliot that gets the thing in Quentin, and is just generally cool with it.

“The law I am beholden to is not one any of us can alter, though, is it?” He reaches up and gives Quentin’s cheek a pat. “I didn’t think so.”

“No. I mean… if I find any loopholes, I’ll let you know. But Margo’s already gone over that stuff specifically. With a pretty fine-toothed comb.”

“Aw, Bambi. Well if anyone could find a loophole…” He sighs. 

“There must be one, for like… a sexual proxy? Um… it might not actually do much good for _you_ , though, if there is. I mean-- presumably, for a high king, there’s… some importance placed on having an heir? And granted, like… there’s me, and Margo, and Alice, and if anything happened to you that didn’t also happen to all of _us_ , which, I shudder to think--”

“Cut to the chase, Coldwater, I can feel myself getting older.”

“And yet you don’t look a day over thirty.”

“You _bitch_ , I know time may work differently here, but I am still in the fucking prime of my youth, I am twenty- _two_ , motherfucker.”

Quentin smiles down at him, drinking in the theatrical outrage, the way he struggles to hide any signs of a laugh, the way there’s clearly one that shakes his chest a little and tugs at the corners of his lips.

“It must be the weight of the crown.” He says, with his best attempt at ‘innocent’, to match Eliot’s best attempt at ‘insulted’. “I’m teasing.”

“Oh, I know you are. You were talking about heirs, the begetting of which is far from my favorite subject, but let’s hear it out.”

“Well, if a high king was… unable to…” Quentin’s free hand motions unhelpfully. “Beget, then he might be able to… have someone else do the begetting. It would still probably have to be someone from Earth, but it’s possible that with the way magic works, marriage would literally have more bearing on the child’s lineage than actual DNA, because--”

“Because why should anything make sense here? That’s nice, but if a loophole even exists for it, I don’t think… I mean I’m pretty sure I’d have to literally be dickless to get around this magic super-fidelity clause, and it’s just not worth it. Like I said, I’m… I _can_.”

“But you hate it.”

He waves a hand. “I’m a hedonist, it’s not in my nature to decline a sensual experience. Being low-key high helps, a _lot_ , although it would probably help more if I could get, like… seriously fucked up. Which I probably shouldn’t. I don’t know, in case of high king emergencies. But like… a little bit high and a little bit drunk, and it’s just…”

“An experience.”

“Not always a bad one.” Eliot shrugs, hand continuing to flail around until he reaches up and finds Quentin’s knee and latches onto him. “And it’s not like I mind being on top every time-- much-- but it’s like… it’s like I wouldn’t have a problem with the _parts_ if they were on a _man_ , you know? In fact, I _haven’t_ had a problem with the parts when they’ve been on a man, like it’s not a big deal.”

“Something’s a big deal.” Quentin presses. It must be, because Eliot is out of bed at three in the morning and he looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.

“I just kind of thought… it’s a political marriage, with a stranger, and she was… So the way I saw it going was, I’d be very careful, with the whole deflowering, very courteous, and she’d be very intimidated, and then we’d import some vibrators and a stack of… college-twinks-go-wild type magazines, and sleep in separate bedrooms, and maybe once a month we’d give baby-making a try. I didn’t expect virgin farm girl to be a size queen!”

He tries not to laugh, at the sentence itself or at the wide-eyed delivery. It’s _not_ funny-- Eliot feels obligated to perform as a husband to someone he’s not attracted to, which is a strain on whatever friendship he might form with the girl in question, which is massively unfair to him outside of that, which is… just really, really gross, honestly. Nothing about the situation is funny, but Eliot is.

Eliot, at least, is always receptive to an _audience_ , and Quentin is nothing if not that, right now.

“She’s gotta have it!” He continues. “I mean I know, I know, I’m perfect and my meat is huge, I’m a creature of uncommon beauty, it’s always been my curse. But she’s so into me and she’s into this whole husband-wife thing, and she’s…”

He stops himself with a huffy sigh, and then the theatrics fall away.

“Yeah?” Quentin strokes Eliot’s forehead, where his hand has been resting, up into his hair and then another pass, another, waiting for something in him to ease. Telling himself this is just what Margo would do, Eliot is always physical with her and outside of that one time with the three of them it’s a platonic thing, touching Eliot is always a totally platonic and chill thing because that’s who Eliot is, and it’s definitely not because he feels anything un-platonic towards him. Any sense of attraction is just down to Eliot’s general magnetism, a desire to capture a little of his secretly-not-so-effortless cool for himself, to have some of that secretly-hard-earned confidence rub off on him. 

That night, with the three of them… Margo had been nice, and gorgeous, and, like… as far as he remembers, really, really good at everything. Eliot had been a calm in the storm. That’s what it had been like, suddenly having his emotions back, it had been a storm. And the storm wasn’t all bad, there were highs in there, but the thing about Quentin’s emotions is that they have _always_ been weighed towards the negative, and he’s _never_ been good at regulating them. And if it hadn’t been for Eliot and Margo, he thinks the crushing weight of having his depression return to him after actually _not_ having it… that could have gone very badly. It’s like why you shouldn’t stop taking lithium without talking to your doctor but times a million. He thinks he and Alice might be too alike in some ways to have been very good at weathering that storm together, loath as he might have been to admit as much then. But Eliot and Margo had kept the highs going, had kept him feeding off of their giddiness, kept him in the high of _magic is real_ and _I just did magic_ and _we can do this thing_ instead of letting him drown under the tide of _worthless_ and _helpless_ and _useless_.

And Margo was beautiful and soft-but-not-too-soft and like… a whirlwind. But with Eliot, it was like… there was a moment, the one moment Quentin remembers with _any_ clarity. There was a moment when Eliot grabbed his hair and kissed his neck and the storm just _stopped_. And his emotions were still _there_ , and he was still a slave to them, he was still in no place to pull back, look at what he was doing, and stop himself, it was just… It was just that he felt calm in the middle of it, like it was going to be okay and he was going to ride out the emotion thing and be all right after.

Which isn’t exactly what happened, but still. It was nice to think it would.

“I’d be okay with the sex if things were different, maybe.” Eliot shifts around. “I mean it feels physically-- you know. I get there. She’s into it. But sometimes she-- she _says_ these things, and she means well, but I-- She just wants to be a good wife, and she believes a lot of shit about what that means, but it’s not like that’s a shocker. There’s a lot of commonality, actually, in what people believe about marriage in a fantasy kingdom that doesn’t even understand irrigation and what people believe about marriage in rural Indiana. So I get it, things are backwards and stupid, but thing are like that on Earth, too. And as long as we’re stuck in this shitty situation, I want to be a good husband! But like… can’t that mean buying her Earth’s finest vibrators and offering a shoulder massage that doesn’t turn into sex and like… listening to how her day was and fucking off to separate bedrooms? We’re stuck together for life, so I would like to not grow to resent her about this shit, but there are things… I can’t get through to her, because she’ll never understand. And so sue me, I don’t want to lay out every last fucking bad thing I’ve ever been through and explain each one in detail because she lacks the groundwork!”

“I think that’s fair. You’re still… maybe not strangers, but you haven’t known each other long. You can’t be expected to lay all your trauma bare just because you’re married, when it’s not something either of you really chose. El… I’m sorry. We never should have taken the blade in the first place.”

“You didn’t know it was me you were bargaining away. You thought it would be you. I’m not mad about it, we were all very surprised.” He rubs a thumb over his palm, where he’d been cut that day. “I mean I’m… I don’t know what I am, but I’m not mad at you over this. Far from it.”

“I’m still sorry. We didn’t weigh every possible consequence--”

“We were weighing the consequence that counted, which was that the Beast would kill us all if we didn’t do _something_.”

“This consequence counts.”

“She talks about changing me.” Eliot admits, and Quentin’s stomach lurches-- not at the words, though he’s not fond of the idea of some girl talking about changing Eliot at all, but at the tone. “Quentin, it may not surprise you to learn that my parents were not pleased to have a son who sewed his own clothes and could quote every line of Steel Magnolias and Mommy Dearest from memory.”

“El…”

“There was, uh, one summer I didn’t--” He sucks in a breath through his nose, and lets it out slow, or at least he seems to try for slow, but it comes out hard and shaky. “I didn’t work the farm. I was, uh… I was at a camp.”

He doesn’t say it, but he doesn’t have to.

“Jesus, El.”

“Yeah.”

How old was he? How hard did he have to work to remain himself while people tasked with his care worked to destroy him? Was it before or after the boy and the bus? Quentin has a million questions, but he only asks one.

“Do you want to put your head in my lap?”

“Desperately, but I’m a married man, remember?”

“If you’re comfortable like that--”

“Not remotely.” He shifts up to rest in Quentin’s lap, hand slipping free of Quentin’s knee so that he can lever himself. A throw pillow that had been somewhat insufficient for comfort shoved under his upper back and the curve of the back of his neck fitting to Quentin’s thigh. 

Which is how he would be with Margo, Quentin reminds himself. Jokes about oral sex aside, anyway. And okay, so he knows the jokes are… they come from a kind of a real place, maybe they always have. He’d always flattered himself that they might, in some small way-- it did things to his confidence to have Eliot joke about him like that, even if it never came to anything. It made him feel desirable to be the target of one of those jokes, because Eliot wouldn’t bother teasing him if he had _nothing_ going for him, there were plenty of guys Eliot didn’t joke about seducing. And sometimes he’d make him blush and make this sound like it was-- like Quentin was-- cute. Give him this look that wasn’t quite… it didn’t quite say he was interested, but it was nice.

And now maybe the jokes are the only way of expressing something real that they can’t have and should both forget about and move past, but he can do moving past. He’s got _experience_ with moving past. And Eliot will move past him-- sure, it’s complicated by the whole marriage thing and the fact that Quentin is _very_ probably the last man Eliot slept with. He doesn’t flatter himself so much as to think he’s the kind of thing you don’t get over. The circumstances are just hard, for Eliot in particular. But it hasn’t damaged their friendship to have this thing between them.

With Eliot resting in his lap, he can actually reach to get both hands on him, for comfort. Given this revelation, comfort is the only thing he can think of offering. Whatever feelings there might be between them that can’t yet be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, it’s on the back burner. Eliot touches friends easily, without thought or hesitation, Quentin thinks he needs that touch. One hand resumes the forehead-stroking, the other comes to rest high on his chest. He focuses on the rise and fall of his breathing, of his cool forehead and the feel of his hair, soft and just slightly overdue for a shampoo. They’d probably have to work out a run for hair products, he’d feel more like himself with actual shampoo, his own conditioner. 

To be fair, they’d all had bigger concerns. 

But Eliot would appreciate conditioner. Having to wash your hair with medieval beef tallow soap was probably murder on curls without it.

Maybe it’s a silly thing to worry about. But there’s room now, isn’t there? To worry about some silly things, too? And after what Eliot has implied about his past, isn’t it normal, to want to give him things? Small things, silly things? Any little thing that will take his mind off of his burdens for a minute? Any friend would want to do the same. Quentin will talk to Margo about it-- she’d be excited to get hair stuff, and she’d actually know what stuff to grab for him, and she could get her own things at the same time anyway, but even if she said ‘I got your shit while I was getting my own’, in Quentin’s mind’s eye, Margo grabs Eliot’s things first.

Eliot lets out a deep sigh, and so Quentin rubs at his chest, just briefly, and holds his tongue.

“Thank you, Q.” He says, prim, eyes closed. “You’re a very good pillow.”

“At your service.”

“Mm, married man.” He tuts. “Oh, even if I wasn’t-- for this, I mean-- it’d happen eventually. There’d be a political marriage and I’d feel the way I feel, and… that’s the price of being royal. But I get to wear such pretty outfits.”

“Oh yeah, well there’s got to be some kind of trade-off.”

“Mm, yeah, it’s the wardrobe. You should see tomorrow’s look, I’d fuck anyone for that. Leg of mutton sleeves, and in addition to those...”

Quentin hums softly, gives his chest another little circle, and pretends to buy it. At the moment, Eliot is wearing a silk nightgown, more caftan than Ebeneezer Scrooge, there’s delicate golden embroidery around the sleeves and even more at the hem, little starbursts against the darker dyed silk, an ombre from pale to deep blue. Up at the neck, where the silk is the color of a spring morning sky, no embroidered stars. Just a place where, when Quentin rubs a hand over his chest, he can feel silk warm beneath his hand… and a little skin. A little hint of chest hair, which he does his best to ignore.

It suits him, the caftan. Quentin can’t get used to his own Fillorian nightwear, which is a little less elaborate-looking and a little shorter, not so different from a long tunic, but it gets twisted around him when he moves in his sleep and the first night he’d actually slept in it he’d wound up waking up in a tangle and tearing it off and going back to sleep in his boxers. Also he’s pretty sure he’d look ridiculous just wearing it out in the corridors, but when Eliot sweeps into a room in a silk caftan he commands just as much attention and just as much deference as he does in anything else.

He’s just that sort of person, Quentin thinks. You instinctively want to kneel before him.

In a ‘that guy could be high king of a fantasy realm’ way, not like in a sex way and definitely not in a… in any other way that’s kind of like a sex way and kind of like a ‘you’re the king and I am but your humble servant’ way but way more intensely personal.

Like, the kind of way you feel about a guy who can reach into your troubled mind when every single one of your emotions is on full boil and make everything shut the fuck up for a second so you can breathe.

Okay, maybe this is going to be a difficult thing to get over. 

Eliot raises a hand, trails his fingertips absently over the back of Quentin’s, where it rests over his chest. He doesn’t mean anything by it, Quentin can tell, beyond his usual comfort in physicality. His expression is relaxed, his hand almost seems to move of its own accord. But all of Quentin zeroes in on that touch just the same.

Not, mercifully, in a way that remotely translates to physical arousal, but still, he’s so keyed into that touch, it feels as if something is being pulled out of him through the skin and that something sticks to Eliot’s fingers and if Eliot took his hand away, he would take a part of Quentin away with him until the next time they touched.

“You should go to bed.” He sighs. “Leave me to my hopeless wanderings. You haven’t had _any_ sleep.”

“Have you?”

“I almost did, in the bath. Probably a bad idea. High King Drowns In Bathtub, Killed By Relaxing Power Of Lavender Bath Salts would be a hell of a headline. If this place had headlines, which it doesn’t. I guess it’s more a town crier situation. Hear ye, hear ye, High King drowned last night in his bathtub, the lavender bath salts got him! Beware ye their powers of relaxation! Something like that, then. Whatever. So I got out of the bath. And I lay down in bed, for a couple hours more. And I didn’t sleep. And then I went a-wanderin’, and then I found you.” He pats Quentin’s hand, and then simply leaves his own resting atop it. “And now I’m sending you off to beddy-bye, you little research gremlin. Think, if I hadn’t come upon you, you’d be reading ‘til the sun came up and then you’d be grumpy and sleepy at breakfast, that’s two whole dwarves.”

“Sure. Stacked in a trench coat. You’ve learned my dark secret.”

Eliot snorts. “Really. You can leave me here, I feel… very relaxed. I might just take a nap where I am. There’s not room for us both to sleep here without a lot of cramping.”

“Do you have trouble sleeping in your bed here? I mean… it’s a little disorienting, when you wake up in the middle of the night, and for a moment you think you’ll be in the cottage, and then it’s like, I’ve slept in a _bedroom_ smaller than this bed before.”

“Do you?”

“I’ll get used to it. But it’s a little weird. Hey, and I asked first.”

“I wouldn’t mind if my bed was bigger.” He swallows. “But I don’t sleep well in it, no. And I don’t like waking up there.”

“You could take mine.”

“Q…” He doesn’t lift his head or move his hand, despite the warning tone.

“If I’m not using it anyway.”

“You should be using it. And I don’t know exactly what would go wrong if I roll over in the morning next to a warm body I’m not married to and things happen, but…”

“Nothing’s going to happen. We’re both about as sober as it’s possible to _be_ in Fillory, our emotions are as normal as _they’re_ ever going to be, and we’re two adults who can handle having a… thing, that can’t happen. If you’re not going back to your own bed, and you don’t want to wake Margo, you can stay with me, there’ll be a full foot of space between us without either of us having to sleep on the edge, it’s not a big deal.”

“Isn’t it?” His eyes open, fixing Quentin in place. 

“No. You’re my friend, El. Everything else… like, maybe things got messy and maybe we have to deal with that for a while, but we’re friends first. And I trust us to be adults about this. And…”

And he wants Eliot to. Yes, because Eliot needs to sleep and deserves some peace and he has to get it somewhere if he can’t get it in his own bed, but… because Quentin wants Eliot to choose him, for comfort. For company. To choose him even if they can’t touch each other the way they might want to, to choose his bed. 

“I still don’t know where the lines are drawn, Q.” He lets go of Quentin’s hand so that he can push himself to sit, turns to give him a sad look, a wry and empty smile. Quentin misses the weight of his head immediately and immensely. When Eliot reaches up to touch his cheek, he leans in. “Maybe someday it won’t be a big deal. Today it is.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know where the lines are drawn. There’s such a thing as an emotional affair. It might not just be about sex. And I really don’t know how the world is going to punish us for that one, so I think I’d better go back to my bed and you’d better head to yours. Not because it’s not an attractive offer. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it’s better this way. No inevitable crash and burn, when I manage to fuck up spectacularly and you find something better. Which would not be the worst end to a relationship, for me, so. Still a win, actually. That would still be a win.”

“El…”

“I mean any time no one’s, like… possessed and murdered, I guess it’s a win.”

Quentin leans in and hugs him. After just a moment of surprise, Eliot hugs back.

“I guess we’ll never know.” He says, rubbing at Eliot’s back.

“Hey… when we’re, like… ninety, if we’re both widowers at the same time, maybe we can hook up. The sex will be abysmal, but if I even make it to ninety I could probably keep a relationship going for the rest of my life. That’s-- mostly a joke. But you can still hold me to it if you want.”

He thinks Eliot makes a lot of jokes that he could be held to, or if it wasn’t for the whole marriage thing he could be, at any rate. He thinks if he’d had his memory wiped, in what seems like a whole other lifetime, Eliot would have found him and seduced him. Sometimes he thinks if he’d had his memory wiped, seeing Eliot would bring it back, that the impression he’d made would overcome real magic. Maybe he should have realized it was always going to be Eliot, when they’d been lined up to be tested, to find the high king, because Eliot’s always been magic itself, and that isn’t just a very awkward crush talking. He couldn’t separate Eliot and magic out from each other in his mind if he tried. 

“When we’re ninety year old widowers.” Quentin promises. “We’ll hook up. I’m sure there’s a little blue spell that can make that happen.”

Eliot snorts against his shoulder. “Yeah. We’ve got time to figure out _all_ the geriatric sex spells. But until such time as I am widowed-- or, more likely, dead-- I’m going to pretend I can’t do anything about my libido’s inevitable decline. _Hate_ that I’m kind of looking forward to that.”

“Yeah, you’ve got a long time before you get that reprieve. Sorry?”

Eliot just hums and snuggles into him, holding on tight. So… neither of them is getting to bed quite yet, but that’s okay. Quentin’s pulled worse all nighters than this before, and staying up a while to be hugged is nicer than staying up a while trying to cram more.

“At least… if you wind up having to do this-- look, um… I promise if we’re ever in another bind that requires a royal marriage, you know. I won’t throw you into something with someone you can’t… Any of you guys. Not if we can find another way, or… I don’t know. At least try a speed dating thing, figure out who would be the least miserable.”

“Sure. I mean… bisexual, so. Gender’s a factor, for me, but not an obstacle? I mean I might be miserable, but the sex could still be okay with anyone. I’d do it before asking Margo or Alice to.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if Bambi could survive this. I mean of course she could, but it’s… she’s not, you know. I would hate to see her have to. I’d hate to see anyone have to, if they weren’t, like… super into it, eyes wide open. I don’t know if we’re allowed to-- if you’re allowed to, I mean, just… do what you want. Or if there are rules about whether or not you’d be allowed to marry each other.”

“Could you not?” Quentin pulls back.

“What?”

“You’re thinking about whether or not I’m going to marry Alice, and I’m not. She’s not. We care about each other, a lot, but… our whole relationship has been people pushing us at each other. Stuff that could have blown over never got the chance to just be a normal friendship because of other people. And we don’t work like that, but we tried. We tried because we like each other, and like, yeah I guess there’s a spark, but… at Brakebills South, it was like… I mean first of all, it’s intensely creepy, actually, to have a professor tell you to fuck someone, and second of all, it happened-- Neither of us was fully in our right headspace. And we tried to turn that into a relationship and it didn’t work. And we stretched it out and we kind of let ourselves be defined, and we learned this sex magic thing, I mean I definitely don’t regret that we got that to work, but it wasn’t about _us_. Our sexual relationship has _never_ just been about us, as ourselves, fully trusting each other. It just fucked our friendship up. And we finally get to move on and it’s like people are pushing us together again, like… it’s not even about what _we_ want. And it’s not fair to either of us.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you… I don’t know. I thought you were happy and I fucked it up for you.”

“No. You just… sped up the inevitable.”

“Well. I’m sorry about that, too.” Eliot takes his hand. “I’m sorry you had to feel like your life wasn’t your own. I guess I know better than most what that’s like.”

“Yeah. I guess you do. I’m sorry--”

“Oh, stop, we’ll be here all night.”

“Alice and I could be good for each other. But, the way you and Margo are good for each other. She could be my other half… but not if we’re together, like… romantically. It keeps us from being honest and it’s… I just wish people would _stop telling us to fuck_ , or like, speculating on how much we _have_ fucked. Because the fucking wasn’t great, really. Not most of the time.”

“Walk back with me.” Eliot stands, tugs at his hand, as if he ever needed to tug to get Quentin to follow. “And I promise I will be cool henceforth about you and Alice and your relationship as it is.”

“You would promise to be cool even if I said no.”

“You would walk with me even if I didn’t offer anything.”

Eliot’s got him there, but he thinks it would be too much, to say so. It’s the things they don’t acknowledge, that keep this from becoming a full-blown emotional affair. Maybe.

They don’t hold hands for the walk to their rooms, which might be another one of those dangerous little things, but when they reach Eliot’s door, Eliot stops him, reaches up and holds his face between two cool and gentle hands. Just… holds him and looks at him, standing in the doorway. Looks at him like he means to memorize every detail, like he means to see down to his soul and memorize that as well. 

Is it still an emotional affair if you just refuse to acknowledge it? Because this is starting to feel like maybe kind of yes, like maybe he’s aware that Eliot wants to have him memorized not just to think about when he has sex with his wife, but to think about when he’s merely lying in the same bed as her, and that’s kind of different.

“Goodnight.” He says, in case that might help speed things up.

“Goodnight.” Eliot licks his lips, his hands begin to fall away only to hover there, nearly touching. Not quite. Uncertainty looks wrong on him.

“Get some sleep, your highness.” Quentin aims for levity, for teasing, takes Eliot’s hands in his just to guide them back down. And it seems to work, there’s a soft near-laugh, and Eliot lets his hands drop.

“Am I ‘your highness’ to you, now? Oh, don’t get me wrong, daddy like.” He bobs his eyebrows, leans against the doorframe. But it’s just joking, the way he always does, so it’s good, it’s fine, it’s normal.

“I mean you are technically my king.” Quentin shrugs, rolls his eyes, prepares to go but doesn’t go quick enough.

“Yes, but in a sense, are you not also my king?”

Oh no, this was the wrong tack completely. When Quentin had said ‘my king’, he’d been thinking about rank, about the difference between being _a_ king and being _high_ king, but when _Eliot_ says ‘my king’, it’s… _possessive_. Quentin is kind of way too into that for anyone’s good.

So he should probably say no.

“Yes.” He whispers. “Of course. In a-- in a sense, yeah. We’re, uh… co-kings, so we’re, like…”

He watches the merriment and the heat die, and the sorrow come in, and he does not move, as Eliot reaches up, and tucks his hair back out of his face. “Go and rest. I’ll be fine. My king…”

He doesn’t say anything more, he can’t. What else is there, when every single thing they say keeps leading them back to the one thing they can never pursue?

He goes to bed, where he falls into sleep far faster than he’d feared, just exhausted enough to overcome his overthinking.


End file.
